An Inspiration to Us All?

December 11, 2006

Spotted on Jeremy’s blog - his entry about judging some awards at the BIENE Accessibility Awards event. It sounds like Jeremy got to see many fine examples of quality sites with well built markup, something that you can admire in any language (although it helps if you understand some of the lingo, too, as Jeremy does). But it was this part of his posting that really stood out for me (emphasis added is mine):

The website was created by students. A small group put the whole thing together in three months. They did this as just 12.5% of their coursework, so there was a ton of other work they needed to attend to at the same time. Under the guidance of professor Stephan Schwarz, they learned about structuring documents with markup and styling with CSS. The end result is something that would put many “professional” agencies to shame. What a debut! An accessible, good-looking site from people who have learned Web design the right way, without ever having to nest a table.

Like the man says, a great achievement and hopefully it’s testamament to changing methods of education. There is a whole heap of bad teaching materials out there that people can learn from, but thankfully I’m seeing more people in the educational sphere who are finally teaching things the right way. Wouldn’t it be great if, a few years from now, reporting on an achievement like this would seem like a waste of words because everone did things the right way? Of course we’re not there yet so, for now, this is something to celebrate. Well done on your award, students of Wiesbaden - go spread the word of good markup even further!

1 Comment

I’m a big fan of learning through experience and this example is probably a good balance of practical experience along side other approaches. This is especially important within IT and the web where courses can rapidly become outdated. The enthusiasm from students will be much greater if a current technology is being used - rather than something obsolete that will never get used, looked or appreciated at afterwards.